It is now impossible to watch George Washington make his exit from public life in "Hamilton" without the face of Barack Obama staring back at you from the stage.
It’s not just that the first president of the United States insists to Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics that "we will teach them how to say goodbye," it’s his certitude that the citizens of the nascent country he had just built will be secure. "And no one shall make them afraid," Washington sings, "they’ll be safe in the nation we made."
Consider the dilemma of the 44th president, the one who just said farewell. It is a fair bet that he doesn’t suffer from the delusion that his exit prefigured an American moment shorn of fear and danger for all. Not even the air of Palm Springs could foster that fiction.
But then that’s the key point of "Hamilton" — when you step away and move into the realm of legacy you’ve no control on how your story is told. Or what happens to what you have built. "What is a legacy?" Alexander Hamilton asks, rhetorically. "It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to tend."
Seeds that might be plowed under, the very moment you’re gone.
Tuesday night at the PrivateBank Theatre, I revisited the Chicago production of "Hamilton," Miranda’s musical about the Founding Fathers. I was supposed to be concentrating on the performance of the recently added Wayne Brady as Aaron Burr to the Chicago company — but was instead consumed by the similarity of the two-person scene, where Washington asks his orator Hamilton to write his gracious farewell address, to what I saw and heard at McCormick Place Jan. 10 at the Obama farewell address.
"Miranda anticipated that last speech, unbelievable," I wrote in my notes, before changing it to: "I swear Obama saw this scene (and we know he did at least twice), and decided to exit accordingly."
Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. But I’m telling you, if you were at McCormick Place the other week, try to score a ticket to "Hamilton" and you’ll see what I mean.
The force of that moment is indicative of something that has changed a great deal in this rich and complex Chicago production since its opening in September — the deepening of the performance being delivered by Jonathan Kirkland, who plays George Washington and who seemed like an ordinary man with a challenging job last September, but who now seems, well, paternally presidential.
Kirkland is not the only performance that has matured — Karen Olivo, always an imposing Angelica, is now in a whole new emotional place for the song "It’s Quiet Uptown." Her work had limited certitude and security on opening; now it resonates with pain and complexity. Olivo’s work in this show, at this point, is simply phenomenal.
By happenstance (I think), the understudy Aubin Wise was in the role of Eliza Hamilton on Tuesday night. The aptly named Wise is superb in the part — and her art brings up the issue of how much better this show works when Eliza has more gravitas. A strong African-American woman, Wise towers over the diminutive Miguel Cervantes, still as scrappy, determined and capable as ever in the show’s title role, and an Eliza of such grace and strength means there is so much more for Hamilton’s demons to fight against. I suspect some in the audience were thinking of Michelle Obama in what Wise was doing. Certainly, one saw an equal partnership. The show is all the better for that. But, for the record, my head also went to our new first lady, Melania Trump of New York City.
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By the way, the new push-and-pull between the White House and Fifth Avenue is also a theme of this show. Nothing is new under the sun when it comes to how the presidency of these United States collides with the personal lives of the office holders and their advisers.
In the world of Broadway, subsequent productions tend to follow the typology of the original choices made — especially when, as in this case, they were so demonstrably Asyabahis successful. You’ll be reminded of that when you watch the original Schuyler sisters at the Super Bowl come Sunday. But "Hamilton" could break that rule — Wise is the embodiment, you might say, of a wise new direction for Eliza; the more force she has, the better the show.
So. To Mr. Brady. Well, he is a work in progress. A very interesting one, too.
One has to stipulate here that Brady is following the showstopper Joshua Henry, who has exited for the West Coast tour and, I’ll wager, great Broadway stardom (and soon, too). Henry reliably brought the Chicago house down in Act 2 as Burr’s resentment at being on the wrong side of the door to the room where it happened starts to pull events toward their tragic climax.
Henry, whose voice is so magnificent and ebullient as to be close to unique, revealed himself with an open heart, right from the start. Brady’s energy is more edgy and complicated and staccato. As has been evident from his rules of engagement with Chicago media, the actor and host of the game shows "Whose Line Is it Anyway?" and "Let’s Make a Deal" has an ongoing persona to maintain and he is well aware of the need to control his own story.
That actually is a better fit for Burr, whose mantra of "smile more and talk less" is, in Miranda’s telling, an expedient choice. Brady has mastered the musical demands already with his lighter but very good voice. And he is beginning to tap into that gulf between self and public character — that sense of putting on a persona that gets the gigs and moves up the ever-perilous ladder but ultimately has to unravel as the need to be true to oneself asserts itself.
As it does with us all.
Watch Brady closely, for his performance needs to enlarge, and you can see how much he understands Burr. Moreover, Brady is a formidably brilliant improviser and that makes him a highly reactive and live presence on stage, far more so than Henry actually.
The question is how much of himself — especially his neuroses and Burr-ian jealousies — he is willing to reveal at this moment. How deep is he ready to go? There is a lot more to probe. But then his part is a singularly intense personification of alienation, the difficulty of reconciling the personal and public, caution and revelation, and Brady has only been in this role for just two weeks. But he’s running out of time, as are we all; he’s only scheduled to be in the show through April 9.
"Hamilton" continues in an open run at the PrivateBank Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St.; tickets are $65-$400 at 800-775-2000 or www.broadwayinchicago.com. Some performances are sold out; others have a few seats available and there is a daily online ticket lottery at www.broadwayinchicago.com/hamiltonlottery.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib
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